I bought "Pop Art" the Pet Shop Boys 3-disc greatest hits collection just before christmas. A lot of people (among them Just) stare back at you incredulously when you tell them you think Pet Shop Boys are great and there are many cheesy hits among their songs, but also some of the greatest moments in pop, and they just seem to get better with each album. The latest album "Release" was one of the best albums of 2002. Pop was never purer.
The "Pop Art" collection is much more than just a greatest hits collection. All the old songs have been remastered, and it is amazing to listen to brilliant tracks like " What Have I Done to Deserve This?" in glorious remastered punchyness. Pop needs to sound fresh and the remastering makes sure that it does.

It's the last day of the year, so it is time to take stock of 2003. I'll spare you the diary entries and instead post a little note about what taking stock of 2003 is supposed to mean.
People are always talking about new years resolutions. You're supposed to be an optimistic forward looking, self improving, progress loving, spirited individual and for that reason you're supposed to be thinking about the opportunities for the future and not about the past. Personally I will gladly admit to caring a great deal about the past. So much in fact that I often approach the future with the direct intention of making it past as soon as possible. If I want to give it a positive spin I say that I'm goal oriented but often it feels more like the negative spin is closer to home: I dislike uncertainty which is why I'm anxious to see the future turned into past to dissolve the uncertainty.
So I actually like taking stock a good deal - which adds another pleasure to the end of the year (apart from the parties, the fireworks, the drinking and the 15 hour database upgrades).
I've spent some time thinking about the perfect stock taking question. Just asking "How was 2003 for you?" doesn't seem to cut it. The problem to be solved is striking the right balance betweeen savoring the good times of the past (sentimental memory) and counting up accomplishments and disappointments to arrive at a final score (uncertainty hating score keeping). I have landed at the following simple question: "Did 2003 end in a better way than it started?". The question serves a few purposes: It balances the sentimental and the rational looks at the past, although I'll grant that the score keeping is perhaps too emphasized. It manages to add a not of outlook on the future since it asks you to think about change. And most importantly, it is not that common a question so people have to actually stop and think about what its supposed to mean - which gets you a much more careful and much more interesting response in general.

In the city of Århus (second largest city in Denmark) the local museum of art is about to reopen in a new building. The building is new, but the interior was actually designed many years ago and built in New York.
Take a look at the pictures and you will see a bad case of Guggenheim envy - of the Frank Lloyd Wright kind - in the interior spiral. Whether this is a nice postmodern joke or a tragic inabilty to actually foster new ideas is unclear to me. I live in a city with several historical pastiche buildings and they add a lot of character to the city, so it's not like i think it's a bad idea in general to imitate, but I think one needs to take a walk through the building to see whether it feels like amusing inspiration or cheap knockoff.

For the record, the recent review and retraction of a finding by a Danish committee on scientific standards (that "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjørn Lomborg was bogus science) does not in any way make Lomborg's book a better book. He still abuses an absurd agglomeration of statictics with a clear political purpose. I still think what I wrote about it whan the commotion was at its peak is true. Lomborg is making undefensible claims about the quality of his own work in a way completely unfitting for anyone seriously interested in a balanced view of the subject matter he is supposedly interested in.
His book is non-science. That should have been his own position and that should have been the response by the committee. The committee should have refrained from issuing a position on those grounds.

A recent Slashdot thread tells the story of a famous sound effect, a particularly ghastly scream known as "The Wilhelm". In an amusing two year old radio segment plenty of samples of the use of the scream is given, and it's origin as a sound effect titled "Man being eaten by alligator". The scream has been the last sound emitted by numerous film villains, and then there are some high camp samples of sound editors working the scream into a film, like the appearance in a silent moment of a Judy Garland song in "A Star is Born". Apparantly the sound has become sort of a sound editors gag - a sound that editors try to work into projects like some kind of auditive graffiti.

Usually Vannevar Bush's idea of the Memex is credited as the earliest concrete envisioning of the Web. But an article on Boxes and Arrows suggests an earlier example, namely that of Belgian man of letters Paul Otlet who envisioned a device remarkably similar to the Memex - but in 1934, years before publication of "As We May Think" in 1945.
One has to be careful in these claims though. First of all - Bush's Memex is more important, since it was a direct influence on later inventions of hypertext and not just a similar idea. Secondly, one shouldn't get too carried a way. The notion of 'universal systems' and classification is much older. Immediate forefathers may be found in the works of the Enlightenment. In fact during the Enlightenment it was the central concept. The Encyclopédie of Diderot is an attempt to construct such a 'universal book', Leibniz dreamed of languages of universals to describe all knowledge and automated discovery of new ideas, and Carl vno Linné founded the study of taxonomy.
You can look further, back to Greek philosophy and imperial inventories of Egypt and China. The urge to classify, collect and compare runs very deep.

Starting Jan. 1, toting a camcorder into a movie theater will be a crime in California. Under the law, moviegoers who see a person with a camcorder in a theater may make a citizen's arrest. Those convicted could spend a maximum of a year in jail and be fined up to $2,500.

Have Californian legislators lost their minds? Sure, the movie industry and music industry is important in California, but come on. First of all, the price (in loss of personal freedom) paid through measures like this far outweigh the damage of copying. Secondly, the legislation will most likely not work.
Meanwhile, it becomes more and more clear that the current strategies of MPAA and RIAA to protect their property is working to their disadvantage. The strategy seems to be to make "One last stand" at the curren tmedia formats - adding copy control and watermarking to CDs and DVDs - but these formats are beginning to be obsoleted by networked storage and new devices like MP3 players and new networked 'entertainment centers' like this and this.
Soon an argument for pirating your music is that you only need the CD or DVD as proof of purchase. You never use the information on the disk for anything because it is just not compatible with your media playback devices.

That innovation is a great destructor of value is nothing new. The telegraph was famously obsoleted by telephones and railways (at least for personal transport) by cars and planes. By not adapting their products to new technology the movie and music industries are building another exampe of this. It is not a given, nor should be a requirement, that new technology supports old businessmodels. Television makes an interesting example: Suppose media owners of the time had tried a use based pricing scheme. Broadcast television made use based pricing unmanageble and use based rights regulation unenforceable. Insted the advertising model was invented, and that model was a perfect match for broadcast television. Televison was not built on the businessmodel of cinema or live performance and it would have been a complete failure if it had. The fact that the new businessmodel has been such a success may lead one to forget that television did destroy a lot of businesses, namely movie theaters. I'm sure one can find complaints from disgruntled theater owners at the time, that television was killing their industry, that sound almost similar to the current complaints about internet based media devices.

Incidentally, I'm trying really hard to adapt my hyperlinking style, so that I link off the verb phrases not the noun phrases. The blog convention seems to be
NP => at most link to some kind of contextual front page,
VP => specific link to topic of sentence.
So in the previous story I would have written before that

Tim Bray mentions....
I will try to rework that into
Tim Bray mentions
whenever I can remember to. If the link collision is not too blatant I'll add general contextual linkage such asTim Bray, XML godfather, mentions

I'm curious where I got the old NP convention from. Obviously a piece of text is a thing not an action, but in the direct style of the blog, inactive phrases like "In a recent essay, by XML godfather Tim Bray a reference is made to...". I am trying to detect some kind of deep, philosophical "this is evidence to my particular feeling about life and writing"-style conclusion here, but I think it is mainly a case of mental economy: I have the link on my mind and in my clipboard and I want to get rid of it as fast as I possibly can, wherefore I drop it at the earliest possible convenience - which is the NP in the simple direct language of blog link-dropping.

I'll spare you the "Isn't it interesting how a text, clearly a thing, is interpretable directly as the action of writing it. The reification of intent." supersmart and way too long post for now.

Tim Bray mentions a Wired essay by Neal Stephenson on the laying of all the cable to ferry the information that we are so dependent on. I didn't remember reading it and a quick check of my "past issues of Wired" collection revelas that the closest to issue 4.12 I could get was 4.11 (The cover of which asks of failed boom time contender Marimba "The Next Netscape?" (both companies ultimate failed but still exist in much reduced form, so now we know the answer: Yes! Marimba was the next Netscape, just not in the sprit intended)) - an issue containing the great "Greetings from Burning Man" essay by Bruce Sterling. Wired was having a good year, obviously.
Enough with the past issue dropping. The bottom line is that I am looking forward to this as much as I looked forward to reading the now classic In the Beginning was the Command Line.

So I left work early to combat a vicious cold. When I got home I scanned once again
1) the recent discussion with Justeren and BoSD on VeriSign's i-Nav plugin, and how the entire OS should just support unicode from the ground up. BoSD mentions
2) Joelonsoftware's Unicode rant. I had read that before, but now had time to read it again. I also had time to catch up on Joel's writing in general and found
3) a favorable review of
4) Eric S. Raymond's Art of Unix Programming which looks like a fun, if ideosyncratic, read. Part of that book is
5) the telling of the story of Plan 9, the planned replacement for Unix from "The Makers of Unix". Buried among the anecdotes was
6) the story of how UTF-8 came into existence as the native character set of Plan 9.
And thus we come full circle: Yes, all the clever guys agree (that group includes by the telling of this story at least Ken Thompson, Rob Pike and Dan Bernstein) that Unicode should not be a hack but just a basic fact of the operating system. They came to that conclusion years ago and here we are still fighting vendor and application specific plugins for DNS/Unicode integration.
How's that for fortuitous circular linkage?

If you use Internet Explorer you may have installed VeriSign's i-Nav plugin to resolve internationalized domain names you will have discovered this week that VeriSign's recent SiteFinder abomination is not unique but rather typical of their behaviour.
Hidden somewhere in a EULA, and in their i-Nav FAQ is the fact that the I-Nav plugin is "...automatically updated without you having to worry about it".
What is less clear from the FAQ is that in VeriSign's world that also means that they believe the company has the right to install/enable additional plugins. This week VeriSign added the i-Nav plugin to MS Outlook without asking me if I wanted that enabled (the timing is due to the fact that the migration from RACE to Punycode has begun last weekend). So the i-Nav plugin is actually a trojan on your system and VeriSign believes it has the right to modify your applications as the company sees fit. Truly annoying.

[UPDATE]
I am unsure to what extent they just enabled the plugin and to what extent they actually installed. The net effect is the same

[UPDATE II]
Learn more about the hidden connection between whitbeer (aka weissbier) and i-Nav in the comments

Note how the telecom regulation story and the Sims Online story provide nice counterpoint to one another. One suggests we need government because even without governemt there will be power, and it is better to have power of the people, for the people, by the people. The other story however indicates that the power that will be is the problem in and of itself, whether it is corporate power og government power. Nothing worthwhile is easy.

Publicized in many places, a judge has ordered SCO to turn over the code they claim IBM has violated rights to, as reported on CNET. What I hadn't seen was that SCO has actually produced the documentation on 1 million sheets of paper in a ridiculous delaying tactic. If you needed convincing that SCO is only in this game to extract money by strong arming nervous linux users, this ought to do it.
As pointed out by one commenter on Dan Gillmor's blog IBM resorted to the same tactics back in 1975, producing a staggering 41 linear feet of documents. By my count the SCO source should take up considerably more space than that (closer to 300 linear feet of paper)

Some notes on JOHO the Blog concerning the regulation of Voice over IP, as telephony is set to disappear completely as an independent infrastructure. Kevin Werbach is absolutely right in saying:

...the real issue is the transformation from the Internet as a subset of telecom to telecom as a subset of the Internet. That means treating voice as an application that can run on any platform, not as the platform itself. The regulatory status of VOIP is just the tip of the iceberg.

The reflex "But how do we control this" seems completely out of place when viewing VoIP from an Internet perspective. If heavyhanded regulation is implemented, the arms race of P2P (in the guise of filesharing) against the music industry will be duplicated as an arms race of P2P (in the guise of voice messaging) against governments. The opportunities to circumvent VoIP regulation are simply too many for any local and fair regulation to be possible, and I frankly don't see how governments can win and serve the interests of their citizens at the same time:
If wiretap provisions were extended to the IP network of the internet, would public access points at libraries and schools be shut down? What about access through company networks. Cryptography enables information hiding on so may levels that it seems absurd to legislate other than through a complete ban.

It's easy to see why people find the story of Peter Ludlow and his banishment from Sims Online - a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game - interesting. Ludlow was banished for running a newspaper on the virtual world, detailing some of the sleazier aspects of the game with the exposure of minors posing as adults offering virtual prostitution as a high point. It is easy to see the kind of corporate intervention that Ludlow experiences as a warning of times to com. Physical artificial communities with highly restrictive bylaws are already a reality even if your human rights would of course be protected in an actual artificial setting. The economics of defending your rights may however make it economically unfeasible to protect them.
The story is covered in a recent piece in Salon (Premium - nonfree registration required) and also covered on the Copyfight blog.
It reads like an advertisement for big government. Somebody has to provide balance against corporate interests.

At least Apple can make people queue as if they were at the Lenin Mausoleum. Watch this amazing movie (Quicktime) of Japanese Mac fans queuing for the first Apple store in the Ginza district. A very, very long line. Everybody waiting with perfect patience. The line is broken at numerous stree crossings, something that would never work here in Copenhagen.

Not for the faint at heart, but this "whiff of the crazy" a preview of "Return of The King" must set some kind of record for outrageousness. It sounds like one of the characters from South Park grew real and grew up. Adding to the fun is the ton of trash culture references used to properly understand the greatness of "Hobbit-Man: The King Returns" as the film is called. Among them some kind of running gag of confusing Golem (as in Karel Capek) with Gollum (as in J.R.R. Tolkien) which works very well in a great, if completely off topic, review.

Just has started a whole new trand, war laundering, i.e. finding WiFI hotspost all over Vesterbro, and in particular finding a hotspot at the local laundromat. Turns out our neighbourhood has quite a lot of connections, which makes sense since it is very much a student neighbourhood. Must have one of those smart laptops.

Obviously my media selection is biased. But I can't seem to recall a similar depth and breadth of criticism being waged on the current Bush's father when he was president as one can find now. It's not just micropublishing:

An anti-Bush documentary was on display recently in an orchestrated 2600 screen "open home viewing". It has sold quite well also

Al Franken's and Michael Moore's recent anti-Bush books have been consistent Amazon.com bestsellers for a longish time

There is that Dean phenomenon after all, bloggers, fundraisers and all

I had forgotten to renew my Salon membership, but finally did today, only to find that I had not been reading Salon enough. Whenever I finally do, I am always overwhelmed by the enormous amounts of material available. If you're a bleeding heart liberal like me and like to read (but don't all bleeding heart liberals?) you really should subscribe. Right now I am reading a great two-part piece by John Sundman on DNA and genetic technology. Sundman is quite a treasure, being the author of other great stories also.

There's a Salon newsfeed also - I don't know if they have good department channel feeds.

The digital equivalent of a million man march is the political google bombing, i.e. a concerted effort to make a specific search term refer to a particular page by social engineering. Joi Ito informs us that the much publicized top google ranking of "Miserable Failure" George Bush is a google bomb. It's pretty evident from the second to 10th ranked page by the way.

I think it is time to apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to blogging. Weblogging has now gone sufficiently mainstream to be useful in mainstream advertising (in the Bay Area at least). That marks a new highpoint in public expectation of weblogging. So we're at peak 1 or peak 2. Now presumable everybody will blog, blog.hotmail.com will appear and AOL will regain profitability because of a new AOL blogging craze, and the ensuing cacophony will disappoint - whereafter blogging will find a realistic place in the world of networked media.

Not that I'm looking for bad news; but a plausible onset of a downturn would be the failure of the Dean grassrots campaign to gather sufficient online momentum to fuel a victory offline. I'm rooting for grassrots on this one - but the immediate future (next year or so) will be interesting.

Why on earth should I have to know so much tech stuff to use my DVD rewritable drive as a backup device. Where is the simple, easy to use "Just use your DVD-RW drive as another disk drive" application that used to ship with my old CD-RW drive? Why are all the DVD applications stupid hacks in comparison. And finally why the hell is the situation getting worse not better? When will software and hardware vendors get a grip?
Suggestions for non-crappy apps are welcome. Comment spammers will be censored.

Al Gore goes left by endorsing Howard Dean in the primaries.
A presidential race with a non-apologetic democrat, proud of democratic values would be at least be interesting if not close. What's also interesting is whether or not (i think it was) Stewart Brand's prediction that the discontent with the current political climate is deep enough that the presidential election will be won by the "I'm not G.W. Bush" candiate will hold true. If anybody needs it, it's probably Dean.

How cool is this: A searchable directory of breakbeats. As an example, here's a solid list of Herbie Hancock samples. I found it trying to locate The 900 Number by Mark The 45 King, with the amazing sax break from "Unwind Yourself". I've heard the sax but never the track that made it famous. That bugs me. Anyone know of a decent compilation that is available e.g. on Amazon and contains that number?

It is a rather natural conclusion: As the tech sector's GDP share of economic activity approaches a "soft limit" (the only known hard limit is 100%), the growth in the tech sector will start to slow to a level comparable to general levels of growth. Technology of course induces growth in other sectors but not as much growth as technology has been able to create for itself, so the final result is a long term irreversible slowdown in the tech sector. This seems to have been a dominant meme of 2003.
Carly Fiorina commented on that at the beginning of this interview (streaming video) and in other media. Before they closed down The Red Herring carried this piece on Moore's law and how the economics of the law may start to slow down the technological promise of the law.

How on earth can a voting machine manufacturer think it is acceptable to be a strong supporter of a political party. The CEO of much criticized voting machine manufacturer Diebold plants foot in mouth.

Don Box is doing a lot of work protecting XAML from misperception and ridicule. The latest installment informs us that suspicions like my own or that of luminaries like Sam Ruby are wrong: XAML can separate style and content as well as CSS/HTML can.